Borderlands E3 Preview

The folks at TeamXbox have finally gotten around to posting their E3 preview of Gearbox's cooperative FPS/RPG, Borderlands.
In fact, the game's battles will be rife with loot drops that are similar to that found in WoW and Fallout 3, so you'll likely never be lacking for health boosts, ammo, currency and gear of any kind. Lots of what Pitchford said during the presentation indicated that his team designed Borderlands to be a shooter with plenty of RPG components, such as experience points for your kills. He also indicated that vehicles are (like mounts to travel through the large game world.) The game will also provide a deep skill tree, so you can choose the type of character you want to be such as a brawler or tank and build your onscreen persona so that has particular strengths.

An important aspect is that your character will be persistent; you won't need different characters to go through the game solo or if you're in co-op (the game supports up to four players teaming up via Xbox Live or two in split screen on the same console to take on the main campaign). If you're in a single-player campaign and you get a message that your friend is starting a co-op game, you can quit your game and enter his with the character you just were playing.